"Mother Nature can be a Mother"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day

“Mother Nature can be a Mother”

March 22, 2011

The recent 9.0 earthquake in Japan and the ensuing Tsunami are reminders that Mother Nature is far more powerful than anything man has ever devised. They also should serve as clarion calls to increase our preparedness to extreme natural (as well as man-made) disasters, however remote their possibility may seem.

For centuries, man has harnessed the power of rivers and wind and used the heat of the sun for his own purposes. Man has adapted to his environment, living among ice floes in the frigid arctic and on arid desserts with temperatures’ reaching one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. However, the relationship between man and nature has never been that of master and servant. A 1960 earthquake in Chile measured 9.5 on the Richter scale, generated the equivalent of 178 billion tons of TNT, enough to power the energy needs of the United States for 740 years. A flood in China, in 1931, took an estimated four million lives. The volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia, in 1815, has been estimated to have been fifty-two thousand times more powerful than the bomb that devastated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Additionally, cyclones, wildfires, hurricanes, typhoons and mudslides have demonstrated man’s subservience to the powers of nature.

Hundreds of years ago and in primitive societies today, natural disasters were attributed to gods who had grown angry with man’s state. In China, such tragedies portended the end of a dynasty. Earthquakes in Japan were attributed to the stirrings of giant catfish. In Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the American who had been transported to Sixth Century England predicted the upcoming solar eclipse, thus winning adulation from the credulous populous. The fact that we capitalize “Mother Nature” is a clue to our respect for the unknown mysteries of the natural world. Even today there are those who see signs in nature’s ugly surprises. Ian Burma, in the weekend’s Wall Street Journal, wrote that Glenn Beck’s reaction was “zany,” after he suggested that Japan’s disaster was “a message from God to follow the Ten Commandments.”

Tom Friedman, in his Sunday column in the New York Times, suggests we are taunting Mother Nature. He bemoans the fact we have no energy policy and no climate policy, and then suggests, somewhat oddly and out of context, that we have no long-term plan to deal with an “unsustainable deficit.” I agree that we have no plans for the deficit, but deficits and natural disasters are subjects of very different pedigrees. The deficit is man made; so man alone can fix it, and the obligations we have incurred have nothing to do with the weather. Neither rain nor sun will improve or harm our financial situation. Only a strict diet of budget cuts and tax reform will save us from sinking into a cesspool of fiscal folly. Mother Nature, in contrast, is something over which we have limited control. We can build dams and erect buildings that are earthquake and hurricane resistant, but we are incapable of diverting a Tsunami, cyclone or typhoon from wrecking immense damage. Earth plates separating and then coming together in a powerful crash, as they did in Japan on March 11, have nothing to do with the U.S. drilling for oil on the ANWR or Chinese coal plants spewing toxic fumes. We can do little, other than continue to study the earth and perhaps learn to anticipate such tragedies and so prepare people. There is no one to taunt.

Most of the time man and nature live in a harmonious, symbiotic relationship. Our food, clothing, shelter and fuel are derived from the earth and from nature. Anthropologists’ remark on primitive tribes today living in a harmonious relationship with nature in remote jungles along the Amazon or in parts of New Guinea, and, in the interest of their science, would like to preserve the timeless nature of their way of life. However, I doubt they would want to trade places. Most people aspire to a future that materially enriches their lives, and that means using the resources nature provides. As societies grow wealthier they can afford to give back and help reconstitute the planet. It is an evolutionary process. (Interestingly, the Connecticut River, at whose mouth I live, is far cleaner today than it was 150 years ago.)

Cassandras have long predicted we are destroying the planet. The most recent examples are the shrill cries from those like Al Gore and Michael Moore, more promotional than realistic, who claim that man is solely responsible for global warming, just as their forbearers claimed a generation ago, through the Club of Rome, that man was responsible for the earth’s cooling. Societies, like species and like the earth we live on, are constantly evolving. There is no question that man impacts nature, often in harmful ways. Poorer countries create more pollution, as food, warmth and shelter take precedence over natural preservation. But we also realize that, as man becomes wealthier he aspires to live in as pristine an environment as possible. And we know that nature is bigger than man; to assume that he alone affects the earth is to assign too much importance to man and to misunderstand the very nature of nature.

Memories are too often short. Millions of people continue to build their homes on top of known fault lines and along seashores that have witnessed horrific hurricanes, as those who live in New Orleans can well attest. Man is also incredibly resistant. In 1923 an earthquake destroyed most of Tokyo. It was rebuilt only to be demolished by incendiary bombing in 1945. It has been rebuilt more magnificently than ever.

Perhaps we will find ways of predicting such tragic events as happened in Japan, so be able to provide timely warnings to those at risk. But, unfortunately we will never live in a world devoid of natural disasters, for Mother Nature can indeed be a mother.